“If impact factor eventually becomes less important than the number of citations, our relationship to journal publishers will profoundly change,” he hopes. “We might no longer need publication in prestigious journals to further our careers, as long as our publications are highly cited. For now, however, “impact factor is still the strongest predictor of becoming a PI.”
The false promise of the digital humanities
Fundamental to this kind of persuasion is the undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over.
.. Franco Moretti, the pioneering scholar of the history of the novel, gives a name to the kind of encounter with texts that machines facilitate: “distant reading,” he calls it.
The New Critics gave us close reading, the engagement with the minute verbal nuances of a text, and the mode still thrives—Helen Vendler’s studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s poems are classic contemporary examples. But as Moretti argues in “Conjectures on World Literature,” one of the essays in his new collection, Distant Reading, close reading implies that certain texts are especially worthy of this kind of scrutiny—that is, it implies a canon. “If you want to look beyond the canon … close reading will not do it,” he observes; you can closely read two hundred poems, but not twenty thousand poems. To analyze such a large quantity of texts, you need to “focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.” And this is the kind of concrete pattern-finding that computers specialize in. Distant reading is reading like a computer, not like a human being
.. Humanistic thinking does not proceed by experiments that yield results; it is a matter of mental experiences, provoked by works of art and history, that expand the range of one’s understanding and sympathy. It makes no sense to accelerate the work of thinking by delegating it to a computer when it is precisely the experience of thought that constitutes the substance of a humanistic education.
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What You Don’t Know About Financial Aid (but Should)
Colleges typically want, in addition to a share of parents’ incomes, about 5 percent of the value of their assets, plus 20 to 25 percent of the students’ (Penn settles for just 5 percent of student assets). But there are differences in how colleges define assets. Cornell, Stanford, Columbia and Duke, for example, take into account home equity.
.. In addition, the Common Application used by more than 500 colleges asks prospective students to check a box if they intend to apply for financial aid. Some independent admission consultants advise students not to check it — to wait until they are admitted before giving the college any hint they will ask for aid.
.. The promise of need-blind admission, no matter how genuine, usually has an even more profound drawback: Many colleges accept students who can pay only a fraction of the price, but most do not guarantee enough aid to make up the difference.
.. Adding to the confusion, colleges and the government label some federally subsidized loans as aid but not others, and not private borrowing. In addition, colleges find part-time work-study jobs for hundreds of thousands of needy students. Those earnings, too, are counted as aid. Should a job — with the same hours and pay as, say, a Starbucks barista — be considered aid?